Wall Street’s market for new stocks has suddenly stalled, but big investors aren’t out of cash, experts say — they are simply hoarding their funds for a historic mega-deal while refusing to overpay for the rest of the pack.
Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI developer behind the Claude chatbot, is targeting a valuation near $2 trillion for an initial public offering that could fetch up to $100 billion in the coming weeks.
The deal could easily surpass SpaceX’s record $86.2 billion debut in June, cementing 2026 as the biggest year for newly raised capital in history.
“Anthropic is the lead story of the Q4 IPO market. Forget everything else,” said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at pre-IPO research firm Renaissance Capital.
“Like SpaceX, Anthropic could raise more than every IPO from both 2025 and 2024 combined, easily,” he told The Post.
The massive deal looms large over a jittery market. Several prominent offerings hit the brakes in recent weeks.
Smart-ring maker Oura recently postponed its Nasdaq listing hours before it was set to price at a $15.6 billion target valuation.
The company cited market uncertainty. While demand was four times higher than the shares available, potential investors balked at the price tag and Oura’s reliance on a single product.
Other firms have retreated, as well. Nvidia-backed Firmus backed pressed pause on its IPO earlier this week, citing market volatility.
Holtec Nuclear, a nuclear services provider looking to cash in on the data center boom, suspended its planned $825 million IPO on Sept. 17.
And SoftBank also delayed the listing of data-center firm SB Energy after investors challenged a valuation topping $50 billion.
Volatile market
While some bankers argue Anthropic is sucking all the oxygen out of the room, market watchers say the pause stems from an old-fashioned fight over price and a shaky global backdrop.
“I don’t see Anthropic as being this black hole that prevents other companies from going public,” Renaissance Capital’s Kennedy said. “I think I would point to just the tougher market conditions that we’re seeing now. If they could get the valuation they wanted, they’d move forward.”
Deutsche Bank analysts Marion Laboure and Camilla Siazon blamed the recent IPO delays on a broader backdrop of “uncertainty around the upcoming US midterm elections, ongoing geopolitical conflict and higher oil prices”.
The analysts wrote in a client note that pushback against tech company price tags actually began this summer when investors “questioned elevated valuations” and “the sustainability of AI spending.”
Investors are now demanding a much wider cushion to take on those risks. While traditional offerings price at a 10% to 15% discount, Kennedy noted buyers now want closer to a 20% discount.
“The market is making a distinction between AI-related companies and others,” Jay Ritter, a University of Florida finance professor who has studied IPOs for decades, told The Post.
While investors will pay top dollar for elite, “frontier” AI models like Anthropic, they view heavy infrastructure like data centers as a capital-intensive “commodity business,” Ritter explained.
That explains why companies operating outside the tech-infrastructure bubble — like biotech startups — are still pricing deals easily. They simply don’t compete with Anthropic for the same cash.
Plenty of cash is still available. US mutual funds, where many Americans have money invested for their retirement through their 401(k)s, alone are sitting on roughly $17 trillion in stock assets, Ritter noted.
But a brutal summer for new stocks has made fund managers highly protective of their capital. At the end of June, the average US debut traded up 24% from its offer price, according to Dealogic data. By late September, that gain shrank to under 1%.
Broader economic pressures are giving buyers even more leverage. The Federal Reserve raised its policy rate on Sept. 16, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield to a 19-year high near 5.3%.
Jurrien Timmer, Fidelity’s director of global macro, recently noted that yields above 5.2% offer a compelling, safe alternative to stocks, putting heavy pressure on private valuations.
“Investors are no longer willing to pay high multiples,” he said.
The biggest casualty has been the traditional middle tier of Silicon Valley startups. Venture-backed software companies, long the bread and butter of Wall Street’s new issues calendar, have largely vanished from the schedule.
Through mid-September, 109 US IPOs raised $146.5 billion, according to data compiled by Renaissance Capital.
Turkey Day test
Whether the pipeline of upcoming stock debuts fully unfreezes depends entirely on how Anthropic performs when trading begins before Thanksgiving. The company is reportedly aiming to go public around then.
A strong debut could unlock billions of dollars for the rest of the calendar. A stumble could freeze the banks managing IPOs well into 2027.
“In a traditional IPO calendar, if a deal this size underperforms, that would freeze the IPO market for some period of time,” Kennedy told The Post.
“If investors have lost collectively billions of dollars on Anthropic, they’re not going to be too excited to participate in the next IPO sold by Goldman and Morgan Stanley. he said.
“A successful Anthropic IPO would be a real boost to the rest of the pipeline for sure. If investors make money on that deal, they’ll put it back to work in the IPO market.”
If Anthropic delays until next year, Ritter said, the holdup will likely stem from the unique risks of frontier technology rather than broader market mechanics.
The company’s draft prospectus claims advanced models could bring “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”
“If Anthropic delays, a large part of it will probably be due to concerns about safety issues,” Ritter said. “Other companies do not need to list mass extinction as a risk factor that their product might cause.”
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